Snow Play 2007

My 3 plus dog and I went to Tombstone pass summet where we go to play in the snow.
Enjoy my photo web-album

Snow Play 2007

Hillary's Closet

Something tells me the Hillary for president supporters have forgotten about the internet factor. While most political figures can rise to a level that practically allows them to rewrite history, this will prove far too difficult in the blogosphere. As the next presidential election draws near, it will be interesting how hard the media will try to ignore what bloggers are digging up from the Clinton archives. Just look what I found with 5 minutes on Google:


Hearings on Clinton Pardons

Scooter Libby, Mark Rich, & Clinton Connection

Tony Rodham and Clinton's Pardons

And then there is the Whitewater Scandal

And I thought getting "Swiftboated"
was a bummer!

Health Care Up In Smoke

Days fly by so fast lately, it surprises me when I look and notice that the last post here is nearly a week old. My mind churns during my morning commute, listening to the daily news of all the crap I could rant on about yet I hold back purposely because before I realize it some of my coworkers or customers will be reading this stuff.

The usual political slant is now outpouring from the news media like Rosie & Trump on meth. The congress is going to speak for the people and pass a "resolution" to send a message to the white house. Spending bills will start rolling out of the capital dome like an lava flow of pig slop. Bureaucrats will be slurping up all the pork belly spending while we all sit at home and sign our stack of forms for the 2006 tax year.Here in Oregon we are going to provide health care for our underprivileged kids with monies collected by our over privilaged smokers via a $.85 a pack increase in the cigarette tax. Funny thing is, all the smokers I know, are the ones with 3-5 kids and no health insurance, so why don't we just provide 1 month of health care for every couple of cartons of smokes they buy and skip all the middle men. You know that with the price of smokes already around $4-$5 per pack smokers are going to either quit or get them on the black market to avoid the tax.

We already have a state tax of $1.18 per pack today, and ranked the 16th in the highest tax on cigarettes. Much of this goes to our state health care entitlement program and this is all depending on a market that declines each year. They claim to be raising the tax to pay for more services but it seems to me they must raise the tax to yield the same revenue with the fewer packs of smokes sold each year. This is the most near sighted policy I have ever seen.

Another way to fund heath care for those less fortunate would be with Marlboro miles, or Camel Bucks, you know those tags on the packs that usually are saved up for a free t-shirt or wind breaker. Chemo-therapy treatments for lung cancer could cost like 20,000 Marlboro miles, you have to figure by the time you get cancer from smoking you would have plenty of miles saved for your treatments.

Uncle Ben

Congratulations to my brother Jon and his wife Jennifer on their new baby girl Paige Roche who was born today in St. Cloud, MN. This my first niece (biologically speaking anyway)





Paige was born at St. Cloud Hospital, and I learned not only do they have an online nursery, they have an online gift shop! I didn't order them anything because I knew all the blog readers out there would be sending the "It's A Girl" bouquet and how many do you really need, honestly?

Sun King Hey Ya

It has been awhile since I vistied Grouchy Media's website. They post some really sweet military footage montages in the spirit of nationalism. There are links to various videos circulating around the web, as well as a collection of military photos. Most recently this one can be found on YouTube so check it out.

Portland Bumper Cars

video from the portland ice storm today.

Let's recap, when the road outside your appartment is a steep sheet of ice, before you go out you bring what?
(A) Kitty litter or rock-salt for traction
(B) Road flares or flashlight to warn drivers
(C) A broom or shovel clear some snow
(D) Your video recorder.

Dementia-Crats

How loony are our leaders already? I keep hearing the same rhetoric from the newly appointed majority in Washington, that we need to get help from the Iranians and Syrians to stabalize Iraq. Mostly based on the Iraqi study group findings. Baker (a rebulican?) surely must be suffering from Alzheimer's! Why would we seek help from the neighbors who supply our enemy with the weapons to kill us? It is suspected that majority of IED's that are killing our soldiers can be traced to ither Iran or Syria. Who in there right mind would expect anything but deciet, betrayl, and sabatoge from a long standing enemy of both Iraq and the United States. This is what we know to be true today, but less we forget that Iran has been attempting to develop nuclear weapons for decades, and any concessions we provide to help us defeat the insurgency in Iraq would certainly be tied to looking the other way when it comes to Iran's nuclear program. This thoughtless plan is the equivilant of allowing the local meth lab too keep cooking if they will kindly tell the tweakers to quit stealing our DVD players.

Kopimist [ Copy-Me ist ]

Although a devout conservative, when it comes to intellectual property I lean libertarian. If music and movies are an art form, I can't understand why an artist wouldn't want their works to be freely distributed. Artists should be afforded quite a luxurious lifestyle if there works demand the attention of the world. Public appearances, the sale of original works, or in the case of performance arts like music and drama, all can be profitable. Even street performers get paid. As an example, if you recorded a very entertaining street performer, then put them on YouTube, if they became a famous figure online overnight, don't you think that would benefit the performer? The music industry has been ripping of the public by paying promoters to shove lipsyncing artists down the ear canals of popular radio listeners for decades. I quit buying CD's when I thought I would enjoy an album based on the hit single only to find I payed $16 for one song, and 10 tracks of garbage. The music business is on it's ear with the advent of Ipods and file sharing networks like LimeWire and now Bitorrent sites like www.ThePirateBay.org so they are on the attack. With deep pockets and tough lawyers on the side of the recording and movie industry, you can expect the winners to be the media execs and the losers to be you, me, and the artists who actually have talent.

Portland Sunrise

We had a very early morning trip to Portland today to bring the girls to a cheerleading competion. This is the first time I can remember I have been in Porland at sunrise. Since the school we were visiting was in the west hills, Nate and I pulled to a veiwpoint to watch this spectacular sunrise appear behind Mt. Hood. Unfortunately, my pocket digital takes great pictures in the light but not so much at dusk or dawn. I took dozens of shots and this is the best of them.

Effects of Drugs

I watch way too much Discovery channel, this documentary on the effect drugs have on the webs of spiders was too interesting not to share.

House Cleaning

I cleaned up a bit, rearranged, and changed the look of Ben's Viewpoint to take adavantage of some new features Blogger has to offer. Mainly Labels. I even took the time to go back through all 208 (Now 209) posts and get most of them into my 5 main categories:
* Entertainment (32)
* Family (11)
* Photography (75)
* Politics (43)
* Tech (23)
Keep in mind you can also search (see header) to see if I have posted a photo or topic on a keyword, such as Sheep or Brad, both that happen to have two results.

If you find a link no longer works, please let me know so I can fix or remove the post. The web changes, and I must unfortunately adapt.

Bad Day

If you have wasted as much time on the internet as I have, you come across about every priceless photo out there. The montage below has been done before with the same theme song, but there were enough unique images on this one to start most of your Mondays off on a good foot. This is courtosy of my latest favorite time wasting website break.com

Seinfeld The Movie Trailer

My favorite TV series of all time will soon be in the theatres, but with a new twist thanks to Michael Richards. (If you just see a blank box, click it to play)

CAIR Open Season Remix

Firearm Death Rates

I've been suffering from bloggers block this new year as nothing new seems to be surfacing. Although I could bore all with posts on new tech toys, or keep up the political rhetoric, neither sounds all that appealing. This one email message I received was too humorous to pass up however. If you can validate or disprove the statistics below please let me know.

"If you consider that there has been an average of 160,000 troops in the Iraq theatre of operations during the last 32 months, and a total of 2,912 deaths, that gives a firearm death rate of 55 per 100,000 soldiers. The firearm death rate in Washington D.C. is 80.6 per 100,000 for the same period. That means that you are about 25% more likely to be shot and killed in the U.S. Capitol, which has the strictest gun control laws in the nation, than you are in Iraq. Conclusion: The U.S. should pull out of Washington."